DONALD TRUMP's
nomination of Senator Jeff Sessions of Alabama (pictured) as
attorney-general—making the hardest of nativist hardliners the
country’s top law officer and head of the Department of Justice—is
a timely reminder that words spoken on the campaign trail have
meaning, that politics is not showbusiness, and that America’s
government takes decisions that make or break lives, shape economies
and set norms across the globe. In the immediate aftermath of Mr
Trump’s election, some boosters suggested that the president-elect
is not really an ideologue, might bring moderates into his
administration and is perhaps barely interested in the business of
governing at all—for all the world as if P.T. Barnum were headed
for the White House. The nomination of Mr Sessions suggests that is
wishful thinking.

The 69-year-old
senator from Alabama, one of Mr Trump’s earliest supporters and his
closest adviser from the world of professional politics, will have
sweeping powers over immigration enforcement. If confirmed by the
Senate, he will immediately hold in his hands the fate of such groups
as the 728,000 migrants granted the right to stay and work in America
by President Barack Obama under the Deferred Action for Childhood
Arrivals scheme (DACA), after being brought into the country as
children. Mr Sessions, the Senate’s most consistent and ferocious
critic of both illegal and legal immigration, has several times
sought to pass laws abolishing the DACA scheme. He unsuccessfully
tried to bar the Obama administration from extending its
benefits—which include social security numbers and work permits—to
more migrants. His legislation would have prohibited current DACA
recipients from renewing their papers, which last two years at a
time—effectively leaving them unable to work or travel without fear
of deportation.

There are some 11m
migrants in America without the right legal papers—a number so
large that many of Mr Sessions’s colleagues in the Senate, from
both parties, believe that not all can possibly be deported, so that
law-enforcement should focus on those guilty of serious crimes and
the government should offer a path to legal status for those who have
built productive lives. Mr Sessions disagrees. He has spent the last
decade leading Senate opposition to bipartisan immigration reform
bills, arguing that illegal immigration depresses wages and takes
jobs from out-of-work Americans. On legal migration, he is a sceptic
of the H1-B visa scheme that helps companies recruit highly skilled
foreigners, such as scientists or engineers, accusing wealthy
business bosses, the government, the national press and the
“cosmopolitan set” of mocking the anxieties and needs of
“everyday Americans.”

On the campaign
trail Mr Sessions has echoed Mr Trump’s focus on immigration as a
menace to national security. On the eve of the election he called for
a president willing to enforce immigration laws, saying that “without
a commitment to deport aliens who violate our immigration laws, we
lose our ability to protect our communities from criminal aliens,
terrorism, and cartel-related crime and violence.” As
attorney-general it is safe to assume he will put intense pressure on
so-called “sanctuary cities”—mostly Democratic-run cities,
including some of the country’s largest, which typically instruct
police officers or city officials not to ask people about their
immigration status, and in some cases limit co-operation with federal
immigration authorities. Such cities call it vital for immigrants to
feel able to report crimes to police or interact with social services
and schools without fear, and will resist federal pressure to turn
their municipal officers into de facto immigration agents.

Expect Democrats to
highlight the attorney-general’s role overseeing civil rights, and
to bring up Mr Sessions’s history of allegedly racist comments as a
federal prosecutor in Alabama—comments which saw him denied
confirmation as a federal judge in the 1980s. The nomination sent
news outlets scrambling to their archives to dig out transcripts of
those fateful Senate judiciary committee hearings from 1986. Senators
heard a Justice Department official testify that Mr Sessions, then US
Attorney for the Southern district of Alabama, had suggested that a
prominent white civil rights lawyer might justly be called “a
disgrace to his race” for representing black clients. Under
questioning Mr Sessions said that he did not recall making that
comment, and could not understand why he would have made it, but did
not deny his colleague’s account. Asked whether he had called the
National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, a civil
rights group, a “pinko” organisation that hates white people, Mr
Sessions told his Senate inquisitors: “I am loose with my tongue
on occasion, and I may have said something similar to that.” He did
deny the account of a black federal prosecutor who testified that Mr
Sessions called him “boy” and chided him to be careful how he
spoke to “white folks”. Twenty years later Mr Sessions is in a
position to avenge that humiliation.

Expect, too, much
talk of the attorney-general’s role overseeing voting rights, even
after federal monitoring of state and local election rules has been
sharply reduced by the Supreme Court. During his confirmation hearing
back in 1986 Mr Sessions agreed that he had called the Voting Rights
Act of 1965 (VRA) a “piece of intrusive legislation.” By the time
he became a senator his tone had greatly changed. He voted to
reauthorise the VRA and sponsored legislation to honour with the
Congressional Gold Medal the black civil rights marchers in Selma,
Alabama, who endured racist violence at the hands of local police to
promote the cause of voting. In Senate hearings Mr Sessions
frequently said that there had been serious racial discrimination
against blacks in the South. But he also sided with those
conservatives who argued that the South had changed, making it
unnecessary to maintain Section Five of the VRA which obliged a long
list of jurisdictions with a history of racism to seek federal
“preclearance” for any change to electoral laws, down to the
location of polling places. In time the Supreme Court would come to
agree with Mr Sessions and colleagues, striking down Section Five.

Democrats and
civil-rights groups charge that Republican-run state governments
across the South responded with a spate of laws making it harder to
vote, including in ways that triggered federal lawsuits accusing
states of unlawfully targeting the voting rights of blacks and other
minorities. As a senator Mr Sessions has opposed calls for Congress
to step in and restore federal powers over voting laws, saying in
2014: “To pass a law in the U.S. Congress that provides penalties
only to some states and not to others can only be justified for the
most extraordinary circumstances. And the justification no longer
exists." Mr Sessions is certain to have those views scrutinised
in his Senate confirmation hearings.

Yet Mr Trump’s
triumphant takeover of the conservative movement makes it perilous
for any Republican senator to oppose one of his earliest cabinet
nominations. That will require a lot of painful swallowing for such
colleagues as Senator John McCain of Arizona. Mr Sessions is one of
handful of senators to vote against Mr McCain when that veteran
foreign policy hawk—who as a young navy pilot was shot down,
imprisoned and tortured in Vietnam—sought to outlaw harsh
interrogation techniques. In 2005 Mr McCain proposed a ban on the use
of "cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment"
against anyone in American military custody, following reports of
abuses in Iraq. Mr Sessions was one of nine senators to vote against
the ban. In 2015 Mr McCain proposed a ban on the CIA, FBI and other
government agencies using any interrogation techniques not permitted
by the Army Field Manual on Human Intelligence Collector Operations,
which sets rules for questioning prisoners of war and detainees. Mr
Sessions told reporters at the time that: "One of the problems
with the field manual is it tells enemy combatants what they can do
and how they can conduct themselves to avoid effective interrogation,
so we don't need to spell out everything that's permitted.”

In 2009 Mr Sessions
called Eric Holder, attorney-general under Mr Obama, “’too soft”
in his handling of terrorism, and accused him of helping America’s
enemies by releasing Bush-era legal memos about the use of harsh
interrogation techniques. In 2011 he wrote in the Washington Post
that the Department of Justice was making a “dangerous” mistake
by treating alleged terrorists as candidates for criminal
prosecution, with the same legal rights to remain silent and be
represented by a lawyer as any suspect. Instead, he wrote, the CIA
should be given access to high-value detainees, and allowed to
extract as much information as possible. “This administration has
lost sight of the reality that actionable intelligence—not criminal
prosecution—is the only way our country can detect and foil the
next al-Qa’eda plot,” wrote Mr Sessions.

In 2015 he urged
colleagues, unsuccessfully, to block Mr Holder’s successor as
attorney-general, Loretta Lynch, on the grounds that she had defended
the legality of Mr Obama’s executive actions on immigration, such
as DACA. Now he is likely to be Ms Lynch’s successor.